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378 R ORDER OF THE CZAR.

closed, churches locked up, the whole a city of the dead, to be awakened as it was when Chetwynd passed through its busy thoroughfares, during the month of August, by five hundred thousand traders from all parts of Russia, brought thither by rail from St. Petersburg and the Bal- kans, by canal from the White Sea, by the Oker and on the broad bosom of the mighty Volga.

Chetwynd was compelled to remain here a day and night, part of which time he occupied in writing letters home, in completing his outfit, and arranging his method of travel.

In the evening, with thoughts far away, he smoked a cigarette, and listened to the military bands playing oper- atic airs opposite the governor's house, and watching the busy crowd passing to and fro over the pontoon bridge which connects the lower and upper towns.

The music, which appeared to give great pleasure to the crowd and to the officers lounging about the gover- nor's house, smoking cigarettes and receiving with much condescension the evident admiration of the crowd, was not a little painful to Dick. It was a selection from " Car- men," the opera at which Philip Forsyth had first seen the face which had brought him and his friends so much misery and distress.

During the next few days our English traveler in search of his friend was steaming down the Volga and up the Kama in one of the vessels that run between the Great Fair city and Persia, where Mr. George Kennan, the American author, had his first skirmish with the Russian police, and whose descriptions of Russian peasant life will no doubt prove to be one of the most interesting and important revelations in the modern literature of Russian travel and political debate.

Dick Chetwynd found his credentials and authoritative orders from St. Petersburg and Mosco\v a talisman that